Thursday, October 18, 2012

The Guided Tour

ONE OF THE nice things about civilised vacations is the way
tour buses pick you up from the hotel, whisk you to Pompei or the next notable
pagoda, allow time to take the same pictures as everyone else and then have you
back at lodgings in time for drinks, a nap and shower, drinks, dinner, with any
luck a tasty one, and then a drop or two to seal the night. Guided tours aren’t
cool, of course, and the tourist who aims to be reckoned a seasoned explorer will
always be aware that listeners expect anecdotes that speak of an intrepid spontaneity.
That your minutely scheduled schlep down the autostrada was the very essence of packaging and predictability is
not to be mentioned, not if you wish to be taken for a serious traveller.

Pollard appears to have done little more than present
herself in order to produce her dispatch from the front lines of the West Bank’s
olive wars, “Israeli
settlers launch assault on Palestinian agriculture”. It was not, as you
might say, that her story wrote itself, rather that very little original
writing was involved at all. Consider:

From the
press release announcing the tour:… 39% of Aboud lands were seized by
Israeli settlements, the illegal wall and bypass roads. In addition, at least
8000 olive trees were either isolated or uprooted by the settlement regime.

Pollard:In the West Bank village of Aboud, where the Palestinian
Authority's agriculture ministry said 8000 olive trees were either isolated or
uprooted by Israel's security wall or the settler bypass roads and 39 per cent
of its lands seized by the settlements….

Then there is this from the Guardian, whose reporter
evidently caught the same bus:

Pollard (indirectly quoting): Settlers uprooted 300 trees in
al-Mughir and Turmusaya villages, cut down 120 trees in Nablus, destroyed 100
olive saplings and 60 vine trees in al-Khader village, uprooted 40 trees in Ras
Karkar and assaulted at least four Palestinian farmers, three of whom had to be
taken to hospital, the Palestinian Authority reported

The
Guardian and Pollard both feature the same interview with the same unhappy
olive farmer, and an identical quote about his picking season no longer lasting
until Christmas.

Is this
the way journalism works? You get on the bus, allow yourself to be taken for a
ride and then produce exactly what is expected?

Fairfax Media stock closed at 37.5 cents today, which
must be very close to what savvy investors rate as the company’s break-up
value. As to its journalism, mostly it is not worth two cents.

11 comments:

Pollard has been feeding the chooks at the SMH with this ProPali mash for quite a while now. Reminds me of the ABC's reporters, who for the duration of their time there have nothing bad to say about the Palis, and nothing good to say about Israel.The left need to be reminded often that (i) the left bank was taken from Israel by force by Jordan and was reclaimed in 1967, and (ii) that Jordan is populated in the vast majority by So-called Palestinians. It is thesecond state. There need be no other, and all this bullshit about a two state solution is going nowhere.

My (limited) experience of tours in foreign climes is that the tour guide gives a patter that later reading shows to have been highly inaccurate and you never get to see anything that might reflect poorly on the narrative being spun by the guide who hopes to keep the customers coming due to its success so far.

This journos' tour sounds very familiar in all of these things, even worse because it's a freebie. They are certainly getting what they paid for.

The Guardian is in the same financial trouble as Fairfax. I guess when you are going broke this is the standard of journalism they serve up. Thanks to the internet we can now recognise junk journalism and junk journalists. It's interesting that around the world the media in most trouble are those furthest to the Left.

Hilarious!Was watching the Gruen Transfer last night (can be OK if you tune out the host and the $1m per annum Irish Social Warrior).They played an advert for The Australian from 30 years ago and commented about how ‘old-fashioned’ it was. Well, duh! It is from 1982 after all. Between laughing at his own jokes (someone has to) the host managed to fire the obligatory ABC snipe at the Oz.They then played an advert for the SMH from last year, which the advertising gurus all agreed was ‘rubbish’ and one of them made the most telling comment of all … “they are advertising to themselves”. How very Fairfax to be drinking their own bathwater!They then played a very long and tedious advert for the Guardian which the fan-club thought was “brilliant” until one of them pointed out that the Guardian was still circling the plug-hole at ever-increasing speed.

Shouldn't that be Mohammed Al Washington? Not too many Georges in that part of the world. Nonny you can put a name to your posts by going to the Select profile button, clicking on Name/URL and putting any name you choose, even Nonny, in. You then become an individual apart from the teeming tribe of other Nonnies. L'chaim.

I don't trust anything the media reports about Israel. The journalists and photographers are taken by their "tour guides" (Hamas, Hezbollocks, etc.) to see set piece propoganda pieces, nothing more. Some of the actors in these propoganda exercises become stars in their own right; the Green Helmet Guy in Lebanon (now in Gaza) who turns up with a truck load of dead children as props for the photographers has become a celebrity, another is the crying woman in Beruit who was standing in front of demolished buildings wailing for the photographers, it appears she owned half of the real estate in Beruit.

The western media is complicit in this disinformation exercise. Either the jounalists are anti-semitic or they are too cowardly to do a proper investigative job.